About Redline

Redline is about developing an alternative vision to capitalism. We recognise there is no possibility of building a Marxist working class party in the current conditions in New Zealand of low horizons and little fightback. We aim to use the tools of Marxism to provide analysis of what is going on and, where possible, give a positive lead.

We welcome comments on all our articles but if you want to make direct contact with us at Redline, you can email us at redlinemarxists@gmail.com

Blog editorial collective

Imperialism study group

This study group, which is being initiated by some of the people involved in Redline, is primarily concerned with imperialism in the 21st century, but will begin with the first great Marxist work on the subject.

We will be focusing on studying and discussing three books:
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism
Tony Norfield, The City: London and the global power of finance
John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
You will need copies of these books – or, at least, access to them – to take part in the study group. For further info on the study group, email: redlinemarxists@gmail.com

Spread the word

If you like any article please help promote it (and the blog). Link to it on facebook and other social media, write about it anywhere or re-blog it.

We’re very happy to have other people re-blog our material, all we ask is that you mention the original source and put in a link to where it originally appeared on our site.

So the more people who spread the word about the blog, advertise and/or re-blog stuff the better.

Blog étiquette

We encourage discussion and debate but, unless there is a good personal security reason, people need to use their names or, at the very least, identify themselves to us. Anyone unhappy about that can always set up their own blog - it's free and easy to do.

Rosa Remixed Up – 100 Years after ‘The Accumulation of Capital’

Below is a further contribution to the Imperialism Study Group. It looks at the book Rosa Remix and Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialism. Tomorrow we’ll be putting up a second piece by Walter, commenting critically on David Harvey’s view of imperialism, following on from John Smith’s examination of Harvey’s work on the subject here.

by Walter Daum (September 2017)

Rosa Remix is a book of essays on Rosa Luxemburg published in 2016 by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Foundation), an educational arm of the German Left Party (Die Linke) which set up a branch office in New York a few years ago. It is ironic – galling, actually – that this foundation, which takes thoroughly reformist positions, names itself after Luxemburg, a forthright revolutionary one of whose best-known works, Reform or Revolution, excoriates reformism as incompatible with socialism.

Rosa Remix is downloadable at http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/rosa-remix-3/. The book was published “with support from the German Federal Foreign Office” and has been promoted and distributed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The book’s articles by various authors purport to apply her work to today’s world, almost a century after her murder at the hands of Social-Democratic authorities in 1919. I mainly want to deal with what writers make of her analysis of imperialism. But first, an indication of the inappropriateness of the publisher is the reference by the editors to one article, which “discusses how Rosa’s theories of small reforms and class collaboration can make us better understand the types of alliances we need to seek.” Really? Rosa Luxemburg had theories – more than one yet! – of class collaboration??!

The article referred to is by Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin magazine in the U.S., who indeed is a reformist and practices class collaboration – he supported, for example, the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the quasi-social-democrat and apologist for American imperialism. But Sankara did not go so far as to attribute such views to Luxemburg. He correctly points out, in regard to alliances (he is dealing specifically with climate justice), that “Lenin and Luxemburg would remind us that this has to be movements spearheaded by workers, in alliance with much broader layers, but fundamentally reflecting their interests.” And he adds: “We can look to Luxemburg and say no to ‘class collaborationism’.” So much for the editors’ version of “Rosa’s theories.”

On imperialism, three contributors take up Luxemburg’s main work on the subject, The Accumulation of Capital, on the centenary of its first publication. There is much essential analysis in this book. But anyone who writes about her theory of imperialism ought to deal with her claims that Marx erred in his analysis, particularly in the reproduction schemes in Capital Volume II, and that capitalist reproduction and expansion depends on the continued existence of non-capitalist economies that it feeds off. Luxemburg did indeed demonstrate that imperialism can exploit non-capitalist producers. However, her theory that doing so was necessary for capitalism was challenged theoretically from the start and has been disproved in practice by the fact that the countries suffering from super-exploitation today are all capitalist, by (almost) any definition of that term.

One author, Raphaële Chappe, deals with the problem very coyly. “The existence of a clearly-defined non-capitalist sector,” she writes, “… is not as clear-cut as it was at the time of Luxemburg’s writings.” And: “More generally, following the worldwide expansion of the capitalist more of production, the non-capitalist sector has arguably shrunk.” Well, “arguably” and “not as clear-cut” are weasely ways of avoiding saying that Luxemburg’s theory of the necessity of non-capitalism has been bypassed by history. Chappe writes this in dealing specifically with the Greek crisis, in which “creditors imposed harsh austerity terms, requiring deep budget cuts, lower social spending, and steep tax increases.” This is indeed a typical way for present-day capitalism to squeeze out more surplus-value, and it is consistent with the thrust of Luxemburg’s analysis – but it does not amount to exploitation of non-capitalist sectors. The burden of this stepped-up exploitation is on ordinary Greeks, many of them workers who create the surplus-value that the bourgeoisie is grabbing more of. It does not depend on extracting value from a non-capitalist economic system.

Another author who deals with imperialism is Patrick Bond from South Africa, who effectively dissects his country’s sub-imperialist exploitation of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa (and more generally the BRICS’ pretensions to anti-imperialism), as he often does. But here he also seems to be trying to shoehorn the data into Luxemburg’s particular theory, even though he says (in parentheses) that her “orientation to [Marx’s] reproduction schemas” was “ultimately mistaken.” He repeatedly quotes her statements to the effect that “capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist relations.” But the main examples he provides are those of extractive industries that strip the continent of minerals, and he vividly describes the infamous massacre of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012. How is this an example of “super-exploitative relations between capitalist and non-capitalist spheres” being confirmed in Africa today?

A third article on imperialism is by Richard Wolff (whom the New York Times a few years ago named “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist” The title of Wolff’s contribution, “One Hundred Years of Capitalism’s Global Relocation,” sounds like his take will be something like John Smith’s in emphasizing the transfer of so much production to the super-exploited Global South. He does do that, but with a strange twist: he contrasts the “old centers of capitalism” (presumably the imperialist North) with the “new centers,” the South. And he claims that “capitalism’s center and periphery [are changing] places after 250 years.” But this is wrong, or at best poorly put: the North still remains the center of capitalism, since that’s where the imperialists are located and draw the bulk of their surplus-value to.

Wolff seems to think the roles have more or less fully interchanged: “In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism in the old centers compensated its often militant working classes for higher exploitation by rising real wages and improving job conditions. Since the 1970s, capitalism offers that deal only to the people in its new centers.” The Bangladeshi workers whose lives are constantly threatened by industrial disasters, and the Chinese migrant workers whose colleagues throw themselves out of factory windows in desperation, might see differently the “deal” that capitalism offers.

Wolff recognizes that capitalism’s transformation has led to a great decline in labor’s share of global output, and says that this decline “already has deepened levels of income and wealth inequality within capitalist economies in both old and new centers (although not between them).” But that last phrase (“not between them”) is also wrong. China has narrowed the economic gap between itself and the imperialist countries (in terms of GDP per capita), but other countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have sunk further toward the bottom. Moreover, the narrowed gap with respect to China has mainly benefited the small ruling and middle classes: wage rate differentials remain horrendously high.

He says the center-periphery place-changing “could well destabilize the whole system,” and he hopes that the growing numbers and consciousness of “the critics of capitalism, enlarged and emboldened by rapid growth in their numbers” (presumably the working class) might “convert destabilization into system change.” Coyness again, avoiding naming the goal of working-class revolution. But that is how Marxists become most prominent and how reformists deal with assuming the name of a revolutionary.

Like the others, Wolff tries to link his analysis of imperialism to Luxemburg’s: “let us carry forward her kind of analysis.” Among other things, he credits her for “integrat[ing] foreign trade and imperialism into economic theory further and with more insight than most economists including Marx had yet done.” She may well have done that, especially since Marx did not live to see the imperialist epoch. Nevertheless, it is not carrying forward her ideas to argue that the center of imperialist capitalism has moved to the Global South. I suspect she would have had a much clearer idea of who does the super-exploiting. The imperialists can still say, as Brecht put it, “If someone’s doing the kicking, it’s me; and if someone’s getting kicked, it’s you!”

Advertisements

Share this:

Related

Odd, at least so it appears, that many, including Walter don’t deal with the critical contention (and error) of Rosa’s Accumulation– which is to say the “limit” to capital, and the crises of capitalism,is one, and are those, of underconsumption.

Not really odd at all. As the foreword to the piece notes, it’s a brief contribution to a study group, not an exhaustive piece on Luxemburg’s analysis. Walter wrote it simply as part of a discussion and I suggested to him that we could stick it up on Redline. Walter is perfectly aware of Rosa L’s underconsumptionism. What I find odd is that you would bother to post what is essentially a snipe. If you want to discuss Rosa L’s view of imperialism, that would be a lot more productive. Or if you want to engage with what Walter actually wrote, that *could* be useful too.

Jesus, it’s not a snipe: The central contention of the Accumulation of Capital by Rosa is that capitalism’s core conflict is between production and consumption, and it is that underconsumption that drives capitalism ruthlessly across the globe is the basis for her theory of imperialism. Her discussion is very useful because it helps clarify, as does Maksakovsky’s in The Capitalist Cycle, that the arguments of “disproportion” and the unstable relationship between “Department 1” and “Department 2” are nothing but expressions of the underconsumptionist school.

Now the title of the article is Rosa Remixed Up– 100 years after the Accumulation of Capital. Pardon me for pointing out what is, at least IMO, central to that work of Rosa’s, and where it’s critical vulnerability is– and that vulnerability is not in whether not imperialism exists, but in its confusion of overproduction with underconsumption, and a real failure to recognize why Marx insisted that the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline was the most important law of capitalism.

But excuse me for thinking that simply pointing out that the actual problem Rosa is trying to attack might have any relevance to what you want to make her work.

You could have posted most of what you posted in your second comment – from the second sentence to the end of the second paragraph – and it wouldn’t have come across at all as a snipe.

I know that emails and comments etc can easily appear as something that they are not meant to be, so I am sorry if I interpreted it as snipey when it wasn’t meant that way. But that’s how it read, so it’s always worth re-reading stuff before posting – something I admit I don’t always do myself!